Modeling Thermal Conductivities and Expansion Coefficients for Novel Materials in Advanced Electronics Packaging

With Moore’s law approaching its terminus, future processor designs must rely on advanced packaging architectures: that is, moving multi-package circuit components into the same chip package. These multi-chip package layouts offer a large increase in device density. However, as components are brought closer together, heat management inside the circuit package becomes increasingly important, as individual hot spots and material warping will threaten multiple nearby components. As advanced architectures such as 2.5D and 3D become more commonplace, novel materials better suited for these architectures must be introduced to improve cooling. Two-dimensional materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have attracted attention for use as thermal materials due to their high basal-plane thermal conductivities and low cross-plane thermal conductivities. We further study the suitability of TMDs for use inside advanced circuit packaging using ab initio methods to highlight promising implementations of these novel materials inside next-generation chip packaging. We will present our density functional theory (DFT) investigation into the lattice thermal conductivities and thermal expansion coefficients of platinum dichalcogenides and other TMDs.